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129 points Varun08 | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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lordnacho ◴[] No.45190513[source]
> at first i was very hopeful i can finally 'build' now with my minimal tech skills

This is the problem. If you couldn't have coded it slowly in the old world, you will have problems coding it in AI world.

However if you have a lot of coding experience, you can now compress the time it would have taken you be an enormous amount. My experience is that I can now make extensive changes with very little effort, and very few dead ends. I've been able to take on entire secondary projects where I was just replication existing knowledge with slightly different tools.

Just this week I had a litmus test. I had an existing database that I'm pushing huge amount of data to. I decided to try a different underlying database. This would have taken me a full week of looking at documentation and writing supporting scripts, now I've done it in the spare time I had in two days of my actual work.

And it's not like the AI just did it all unsupervised. It threatened to do down the wrong path a few times, but each time I spotted it and steered it the way I wanted. I also asked it a few questions about curiosities I discovered in the emitted code, and that led to fixes as well.

If I didn't know how to code before, I would still be coding this alternative database.

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lawlessone ◴[] No.45190600[source]
This will be a big problem in the future if it means more companies choosing not to hire/train juniors.

Eventually all the experienced people will be dead or retired.

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1. lordnacho ◴[] No.45190730[source]
Assuming the current way to become senior is the only way?

I could still see a select few being given a foot in the door and leaping over the "argh why doesn't it compile" stage, past the "argh, I need a whole new architecture" stage to become senior in a few years. Every cohort has a few unicorns.

Alternatively, coding goes the way of the calculator. By that I mean, the people that used to be part of the engineering team, doing arithmetic. You just hire domain experts and give them the AI hoping the domain expertise is all you need to get you through the day.

Finance has historically had a lot of people who thought they could code, now perhaps they will get better. Big risk of it becoming a mess larger than back when they got VBA.

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2. johnnyanmac ◴[] No.45191144[source]
I don't see "senior vibe coder" going in any way that doesn't end in constant forest fires that they try to put out with a flamethrower. This happens even with seasoned engineers. Unicorn hunting for the exceptions will be every bit as infeasible in 2045 as it was in 2005.

> You just hire domain experts and give them the AI hoping the domain expertise is all you need to get you through the day.

what domain experts? Clearly they are trying to replace everyone with AI. That's the unsettling part of the whole story; this phenomenon is happening across many sectors who want to try and skimp out on talent.